Son of Krampus (Holidays of Love)

by Ellen Mint

  “Sure, sure. Nothing else going on between you two rutting around on damn near every blanket in the house.”

  “It was one house we rented.”

  “Ha!”

  The urge to curse at his father rose in his gullet, but Emeric swallowed it down. He was letting the old man win this battle of wits because he didn’t know what to say to Nadire. Should he hug her? Offer to get her coffee? Maybe try to flag down a doctor himself to learn more information? Sit with her and tell her she wasn’t alone?

  Even as his brain fizzled out with ideas, his body walked him to the woman barely clinging by a thread. He could see the tears dripping down her face despite her head hung low. Her lap trembled, rattling the clipboard under her as she tried to write down her father’s name.

  “Nadire?” Emeric whispered.

  The pen stopped immediately, her thumb clicking on the end to retract the nub as she looked up at him. “What?” she gasped like a drowning woman praying for anyone to hurl her a life preserver.

  “I…” What did he say? What should he do? “I’m so sorry about your father.”

  “Sorry?” She slammed the clipboard onto the chair beside her and rocketed to her feet. “You’re sorry?! Is that all you have to say to me?”

  “No.” Emeric grew incensed by her reaction.

  “Then what?” She slapped her hands against her thighs, then did it again when he fell silent. “What do you have in your pantheon of words to make this better? To stop you from…from trying to kill my father!”

  “I didn’t!” Emeric growled, all of his defenses up in an instant. “We didn’t plan this. It wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “Well, it fucking did!” Her words drowned in unwanted tears, her voice trembling but refusing to sink as Nadire wrapped herself in a hug. It was clear his touch would be as wanted as barbed wire, her once welcoming eyes slicing through him.

  “You walk into our lives unbidden causing nothing but misery and pain, and now he’s in there, right there, dying! Sixteen hundred years, one thousand and six hundred fucking years of service, and now…now…” Her body trembled as if she was about to faint. On instinct, Emeric lashed his arms out to try and support her, but she revived and shook him off.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t ever touch me again! Just…leave me alone, please. Go away and stop—stop hurting my family.” Her thundering anger faded to a whimper as she curled up into her chair. With a hand wrapped around her face, she tried to focus on her paperwork leaving Emeric gawping in confusion. He could read the pain etched across her face, her body, her soul, but there wasn’t a thing he could do except add more.

  Limping away, his head hanging down, he whispered to her, “I’m sorry, for your father.” Nadire snorted in response as if she didn’t care what he thought as if she’d never care for him. “And,” Emeric said with a hand placed to the wall, “the lawsuit’s off. You never have to see me or my father ever again.”

  He didn’t glance back to see if she looked, he couldn’t handle the crushing rejection of her grimly nodding at the thought of him vanishing forever. Instead, he gave in to her wishes and walked away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  SKIN YELLOW AS tobacco stains, his veins knotted like ropes rising above the sallow and sickly flesh as they pulsed from the medicine dripping into them. In all her long life, Nadire always remembered her father’s hands as warm as a cake fresh out of the oven. But curled up on the blanket they were cold and numb.

  A slow beep reverberated from one of the dozens of machines keeping him alive. She’d expected to have the lights drawn low but they were all blaring white as if it didn’t matter how restful the man in the bed found the room to be. Rolling her palm under his, Nadire excised his fingers up and almost snickered. Soot remained under his nails.

  It’d been hours since Nicholas of Myra was admitted to the hospital. No, for how in a fog Nadire was it could have been days. Her life was sitting in that sterile, impassive waiting room. Burnt coffee had froze on the end table beside her while she didn’t read the magazines in her lap, didn’t listen to the tv rolling through every manner of daytime options, and didn’t see the phone that’d drained to ten percent battery hours earlier. All she knew were the moments when a doctor or nurse would appear, demand a signature or agreement, and never tell her enough.

  When they finally pulled her into her father’s room, he was sound asleep. Aaron used to dare her to sneak into their father’s study during the afternoon and stick candies in his hair. Even when Nicholas was deep into his dreams, unaware that he’d wake with a dozen lemon or peppermint drops in his scratchy curls, he’d never looked so gone. She kept picking up his hand, feeling the pulse of sluggish blood struggling against the blockage, to remind herself that the world hadn’t lost Santa Claus.

  That she hadn’t lost her father.

  A sound outside the room caused Nadire to glance up to the window. It was darker in the hallway, rendering the man into a shadow, but she scowled at the reminder. Mirek Hellswarth paced just outside her father’s sickbed as if he intended to rip down the man’s bed curtains to sell them. A growl tried to catch in Nadire’s gut, to burn down her veins so she’d find the ability to rise and have the cause of this catastrophe thrown out.

  But exhaustion dampened that fire like wet snow. His fault. Their fault. If not for them, for the Hellswarths forcing this lawsuit on them. For impeding her father during his most stressful time of year. Daring to…

  Wary eyes drifted over the man propped up on a solitary pillow. The glimmer had fully evaporated leaving him in his usual peppery beard and hair, his skin brown as wrapping paper, and only a thin hospital gown around his weak body. “I’m sorry, Father,” Nadire whispered. She struggled to rise to her feet, wiping away a fallen curl from his forehead. They’d grown too long from his preferred close crop, no doubt because he had far bigger problems on his mind.

  “Those God damn…” she cursed to herself before wincing, but he wouldn’t rise to chastise her. It was doubtful he even heard her. Glancing out the window, she watched Mirek vanish back to wherever he kept going. She knew Emeric left the hospital, practically ran to the elevator after she told him off. But that stubborn old fool remained.

  “It’s my fault,” Nadire gasped. “If I hadn’t…If I didn’t force him on you then—” She thought she was so clever, finding an opening for not only Mirek but… It hurt to even think his name, every thought filled with images of his eyes shattering while she screamed her pain at him. Why did everything hurt?

  “I was an idiot,” she confessed, struggling to close off her bleeding heart. That cursed thing, when it found love it doomed her father’s. “It won’t happen again, I swear.”

  The door flew open and Nadire glanced up just as opening arms came for her. She barely had time to wipe at her eyes before her mother swept her up in a hug, murmuring, “Baby girl” in old Greek. Adalet kept Nadire’s face pinned to her shoulder, letting her daughter wipe up the last of her dignity, before releasing her python grip.

  “Mom, it’s—” Nadire began, but Adalet talked over her.

  “A heart attack, I spoke to the doctor on the way in. They have him scheduled for surgery in a few hours to clear the blockage.” She turned away from her distraught daughter to the husband who’d been with her in sickness and in health for so many lifespans. “Nicholas, my sweet, what have you done? I told him to stop, with the pipe. But would he ever listen? No! And look at him! He’s…”

  Nadire was the one to take over, holding her tight while stopping the self-flagellation, “Mom. Mom, it’s not your doing.”

  “No, I suppose not. He is a grown man, and I cannot bear the blame for all of his choices.”

  That wasn’t what she meant. If not for this lawsuit, if she’d kept her nose out of it, if she’d not given into her girlish delights and ignored Emeric. If she’d never gone up to his hotel room that first night none of this would have happened. Nadire knew it in her weeping heart. It was on her head that Sa
nta Claus was dying.

  “Aaron,” their mother called, both women turning as the wayward sheep returned to the flock. A scarf dangled halfway off his neck as if he’d been outside when he got the call and windstrode straight here.

  “Mom, what happened? How is he? What are the chances?” Aaron spat out fast. Even being able to travel at nearly the speed of light wasn’t enough as the man nearly collapsed from his run.

  “Stable, which sounds as if it was a miracle itself,” Adalet surmised. No doubt she’d put the screws to the doctor who was shocked to find that the woman dressed like a reindeer herder was also once an MD. “They think he’s young and healthy, so there’s hope for the surgery to succeed, but…”

  Walking past her son and daughter left teetering on the edge, Adalet soothed her palm to her dying husband’s forehead. She whispered something shared only between the two of them while trying to fix Nicholas’ knotted curls. “We are not normal. We don’t even know if we were truly given immortality or…merely more years than others.”

  “Mom, what are you saying?” Aaron gulped, tears in his eyes.

  Adalet gulped. “That I cannot guess what will happen.” She stepped away from her occasionally estranged husband and turned to her eldest. “Aaron, what of your babies?”

  “They’re tucked in bed. I have Sarah watching over them. Don’t think you’re getting rid of me with the threat of having to take my kids to school, Mom. I’m not leaving Dad’s side.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said without saying much. There was a lot more going on in her mother’s and brother’s life that Nadire never found the time for.

  Another click of the heels and a shadow caused Nadire to glare at the return of the Krampus. A growl must have slipped her lips as she felt Adalet grip her shoulder and ask, “What is it?”

  “He will not go. He keeps pacing about like a vulture. Why won’t he just get out of here!” Nadire scowled, trying to focus on anything but the progenitor of this mess.

  “Mirek?” Adalet asked, no doubt recognizing the slouched posture or the cruel fingers. “Leave him be, child. He’s doing what he must.”

  “It’s his fault,” Nadire spat, her fists bunching as if she was looking for a fight. Maybe she was, to let loose, snarling and biting at anything in her way. A cool hand cupped her shoulder, Adalet slipping back into the true command of the family at a moment’s notice.

  “There is no blame to pass around now, least of all at Mirek.”

  “You don’t understand, mother. You weren’t…”

  “I have known far more of this world centuries before you existed, child. Watch yourself.” The fire blazed in her mother’s eyes, daring her to keep picking at this festering wound no one would even speak of. Nadire glared from the woman who birthed her and looked about to send her back to the void, down to her father. Her heart tried to raise anger at his constant obfuscating of the truth, but it couldn’t take. Not when he looked as fragile as a porcelain doll crumpled on the floor.

  The door opened again, nurses hustling around the bed. Most talked to Aaron at first, but their mother interceded asking all the fancy questions that flew over her children’s heads. “Mom?” Aaron voiced after a time. Adalet turned from inspecting a changing of IVs as if she was the lead doctor.

  “They’re prepping him for surgery.”

  “Already?” Nadire piped up. They’d said that it’d take time, to get a doctor, or surgeon, or something.

  As Adalet’s lips paled from her pursing them so tight to keep the truth locked in, Nadire understood. He was getting worse. It was now or never. “We should give them room,” Adalet said, shooing her children out the door.

  When Nadire glanced over at her brother, instead of finding him already slipping out, she caught him in prayer. Not the one they learned as kids at the feet of a bishop but from his new and very old religion. Aaron rose out of it, feeling his sister’s piercing gaze. With a shrug, he held open the door.

  “After you…”

  Just as she was about to leave, Nadire felt the phone in her back pocket shake to life. Rote muscle memory caused her to tug it out and inspect the number before she blanched at the tacky move. Before she put it away, her brain registered it was the North Pole and the damn thing answered for her.

  “My lady!” Tin’s voice blared from her palm.

  In a panic, Nadire swept the phone to her ear and hissed, “Now is not a good…”

  “It’s the staff!” The elf sounded like she was bawling and hyperventilating at the same time. They hadn’t taken the news of her father’s illness well, the elves all threatening to storm the hospital and use their magic to heal him. But it didn’t work on humans, not even immortal ones. So Nadire had left them with the cryptic words of heart attack and Saint Nicholas, and cut off all communication to wallow in misery.

  The mention of the staff fully threw her for a loop. “What about the staff? Just cancel all meetings…”

  “No, not the staff,” Tin didn’t help at all, “The Staff. The Bishop staff. You know. Seven feet tall, crystal at the top, source of all magical power for Christmas.”

  A chill swept over Nadire’s body, every goosebump on her body rising as she glanced up to see three nurses listening in. More than that, they were glaring at her, one about to tell her to take her conversation outside.

  Cupping a hand to the back of her phone, Nadire paced out past her brother. “What do you mean something’s wrong with the staff?”

  “Well, it’s floating and…angry.”

  “Angry?” God’s bells, she did not need this now. Or ever. How could an inanimate object be angry? It was a stick.

  Tin’s voice winced as she forced out, “Anyone who gets too close gets vaporized.”

  “What?!”

  “It’s not a problem, we reconstitute ourselves after. Drac’s taken about thirty explosions and keeps running back in. But there’s another issue. The crystal, it’s pulsing and they’re coming faster.”

  Nadire’s hand slipped, pressing the phone directly to her lips and nose as if she could hide behind it. A string of cursing slipped from her mouth, most missing the elf and hitting the others milling about in a hospital hallway. “A staff malfunction? How am I supposed to…? What do you want me to do about it?”

  “S…stop it?”

  “That’s Dad’s…” Her rant faded as she watched the nurses finishing up the last of their prep. Unsurprising, her mother remained in the room because no one could shake Adalet of Myra. The great Saint, the man whose generosity sparked a holiday tradition for over a thousand years, whose very nature was intertwined with Christmas, lay dying on a plastic bed.

  Nadire’s arm and the phone both plummeted. She could hear Tin yelling for advice or orders, but she didn’t have the energy to give them. What could she tell her? Nicholas never told his children how to work the staff, how to calm it, if it could become angry. What more could go wrong?

  “Nad?” Aaron whispered her despised nickname. She wanted to hate him for it, to hate every cruel twist of fate, but she was spent. Her heart was too exhausted to feel. “You have to fix this.”

  A snicker of pain rolled off her tongue, Nadire gazing around the hall. “Sure. Nadire, fix this problem. Naddie, solve this. Nadire make it all better. I’m not God!”

  “I know.” Aaron was in full talking to a rabid animal mode, one hand extended as if he feared her biting his head off. “But you’re…” He swallowed whatever asinine answer he was going to give and glanced in at their father. “You might be the only hope he has.”

  “So I’m a doctor too? Boy, I sure do keep busy!” Okay, she was rounding about to hysterical lane. Why couldn’t people just let her cry in peace? Why couldn’t she be allowed to crumble instead of having to be the bulwark?

  “Du farkirtst mir di yorn!” Aaron cursed, his hands extended as he paced about as if praying for God to deliver him from his family. “Dad falls and the staff acts up. You don’t think that’s related?” He pointed to their
father, causing Nadire to glance into the room.

  There were plenty of easier explanations. Their father would keep the staff balanced, or it knew something was wrong, or one of the damn elves touched it when they shouldn’t. For him to leap right to ‘Nadire, you have to save the family’ was a stretch, and… Her eyes narrowed on the man so certain he’d abandoned his new family for the old one. “What do you know?”

  The wind drained from her brother’s puffed up sails, his cheeks deflating as he turned to face the wall. “There was a time when Father, he thought it his time to pass the torch on.”

  “To you?”

  “Yes, to me. Is that such a surprise? I am first born and…” Aaron’s ranting faltered as he locked eyes with his sister. Feeling slighted for not even being invited crossed her mind, but Nadire’s heart was still plunged in the ice of grief. It’d come later. “You know Dad, he’s a traditionalist. But…it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Bouncing his hand as if he held a pile of keys and needed to entertain a baby, Aaron glanced all around the room. He dug into the back of his hair, scratching madly before sighing. “It’s why I left, Nad. Dad wanted me to take over, to be the next…” Aaron’s eyes darted around before he lowered his voice, “Santa. Brought me to the staff, said a few words in Latin I can’t remember, and…nothing.”

  Tears welled in her brother’s eyes startling Nadire. He wasn’t without his passions, but far as she knew he’d turned his back on the family endeavor with great happiness. “I’m not good enough for the sleigh, and the suit, and all of Christmas. But maybe you are.”

  “What? You can’t be serious.”

  “Dad’s not looking good, it’s getting worse. Mom wouldn’t be in there bossing everyone around if she didn’t know shit. You know that just as well as I do.”

  “So what? You want me to run up to the North Pole, grab the staff, and become Santa Claus? This is madness! I belong here with you and Mom. With father.”